The Cole Camp German Club held their quarterly meeting on Friday evening, July 19 at the Triple Creek Golf Club House. The Club’s members enjoyed a delicious pot luck supper with the Board providing a main entrée of Meatloaf, potatoes and hot rolls. The meal was supplemented with delicious salads and desserts.
During the meal the group was entertained with old country music songs sung by Gene Beckman in the native low German language. Roy Ehlers told stories and jokes in the native language as well.
The program for the evening was given by Julia Morse, a descendant of Herman “Sea” Harms, the Bockelmans and the Muellers that settled in Cole Camp after leaving Germany for America. Julia is an Associate Professor of Engineering Technology for Kansas State University.
While in high school Julia studied German and improved on her language skills by home reading. This allowed her to obtain a work/scholarship to Germany while she was in college. With the assistance of a Cole Camp cousin she made contact with a Harms cousin who still lives in the family farmhouse in the native village of Hanstedt.
Julia shared many photos she had taken of the landscape in the Hanstedt area and many other locations in northern Germany. She did make the acquaintance of Heinrich Harms and visited the old family homestead. Julia shared Heinrich said he held Herman “Sea” Harms in high regard for his determination to become an American citizen.
He explained he had heard in 1989 that a large contingency of Germans were planning a trip to Cole Camp to find long lost relatives and he decided he wanted to join them but he missed the sign up date to be with the group. Not to be deterred he booked his own flight. Heinrich shared with Julia he found the long flight a miserable experience not to mention how wretched he thought the weather was in Missouri in the humid, heat of a mid-western summer.
He did enjoy meeting so many descendants of old “Sea” and marveled at his determination to give his family a new life in America, where plenty of land was available to prosper. As the family has passed down Hermann’s near fatal voyage when the ship went down and he survived for days by clinging to a floating timber until he was finally picked up and taken to New York.
There he worked and saved his earnings. He then booked another voyage back to Germany so he could wed his sweetheart, Catherine. In later years the couple and their children sailed back to America and made their home at Cole Camp where today there are a large number of their descendants.
What struck Heinrich was how miserable he had been in flying to America and felt embarrassed he had complained when he learned that Herman had sailed across that Ocean on three separate occasions in God only knows what conditions.
Julia shared she had focused on getting acquainted with the everyday lives of the German people. While there she had taken every opportunity to tour and photographed all she saw. One interesting picture was of a house several centuries old with a thatched roof. High in the eaves was a small opening that allowed Owls to enter and roost inside. This was encouraged as the thatched roofs attracted mice that damaged the thatch but the owls feasted on them and prevented the destruction.
Perhaps the most touching picture was taken in Bremerhaven, a sea port that has several museums and memorials to the emigrants leaving for America by the thousands. The memorial that told the story without words was the family holding hands awaiting the ship. The father and child are gazing out to sea and their promise of a better life across the water, while the wife and mother looks longingly back to her much loved and familiar home.
